Tracing Black history in Niagara is no easy task, Rochelle Bush says. As owner and principal guide for Tubman Tours, Bush spends her days telling others about Niagara’s Black History. All the while, she has wanted to delve more deeply into the history of her own family and discover its place in Niagara. It’s a project she started while still a teen but – as is often the case – life happened, and her research was put on hold.
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the St. Catharines resident resumed her quest. Logging on to Ancestry.ca, she began to root through documents on to see what she could find beyond stories she had already heard that linked her family to Harriet Tubman. That connection came via her great-great-grandfather, a one-time minister at the Salem Chapel BME Church in the Garden City.
“In my own family history, we were always told that my great-great-grandfather, who was the minister in charge here for a period of time when Harriet Tubman was here and affectionately known as Rev. James Henry Harper, was part of the Underground Railroad,” Bush said.
But given the times, Bush wasn’t sure how James would have been free to travel the country as a minister. Were he escaping slavery, he would not have had the opportunity to travel.
“How can this guy be an African Methodist Episcopal minister and travel all over in the United States when the 1850 fugitive slave law is active? How come he could go anywhere, everywhere?”
Turns out Harper was not a slave but was, in fact, born a free man in South Carolina.
“That explains everything,” Bush said.
But her great-great-grandfather’s story shows the difficulty that can be encountered tracing Black history. Often, there is little in the way of documentation, but Bush has managed to find out information on her great-grandfather and great-grandmother.
She traced the life of her great-grandfather John Jackson Bush to Pelham, where he was a farmer.
“He was born in Oro (in south-central Ontario), and then he migrated down here after he married Angelina Legere, who was born in Grimsby,” Bush said. “And then they settled in Pelham.”
It is also where her grandfather, James William Bush, was born. He later moved to Toronto and worked as a sleeping car porter for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
“That was pretty much the only employment positions for black males at the time,” Bush said.
That was pretty much the only employment positions for black males at the time
She also found information about her great-grandmother, Esther Williams, who Bush said once was “living as a waif in the streets of Port Robinson,” now a part of Thorold.
“It's very hard to trace the women, because you don't know how many times the name changed,” Bush said. “Men have one surname; women could be married three or four times.”
And that is just one hinderance. There also is a lack of documentation of migration patterns.
That’s according to Tami Friedman, associate professor and chair for the Department of History at Brock University. She said many people escaping slavery south of the border did not stay put in places like Thorold or Pelham very long, but rather moved on to areas where other African Americans had settled.
“People of African descent came up here and followed patterns that are very similar to what you see in lots of different migrant communities today, in the sense that they are they settled in places where other fugitives and free people of African descent had already settled, and where those folks were already building community institutions like churches and schools,” Friedman said.
So, the larger cities – places like St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Chatham and Toronto – became likely destinations rather than the smaller towns and villages.
“People were gravitating toward those communities,” she said.
African Americans also faced discrimination, which limited opportunities available to them, Friedman said.
“As people of African descent, most male fugitives, which was the vast majority of those who came up here, would have found work as common labourers,” Friedman said. “In some cases, I know that I've come across a reference to some of them getting jobs as, for example, porters in hotels. Women would have gotten work almost exclusively as domestic servants, so they'd be working as cooks, maids, washer women, working for white families.”
Bush’s grandfather’s job as a porter fits that narrative, Friedman said.
Bush, meanwhile, said she will continue her research into her family. She knows she must be patient.
“I just know that it takes a lifetime,” Bush said. “It's not something that you can do overnight, and it's not anything that can be done quickly. You have to remain committed.”